Civilization – Nature – Subjugation

During the second half of the 16th century, the transatlantic slave trade to the plantations in South America and the Caribbean islands intensified and reached a cynical, highly efficient economic rationality that relocated about 12 million Africans to the Americas over the course of roughly three hundred years. It remains unknown how many died during the voyage; estimates indicate that this number is most likely in the millions. To what extent was the slave trade driven by the increasing demands placed on the labor force, especially since the majority of Amerindians had died as a result of violence and diseases, and because the ban on the enslavement of (and the war on) the Amerindians was never really respected by the encomenderos?

For centuries, theologians (Catholics and Protestants alike), legal scholars, and philosophers of humanist and other backgrounds got involved in efforts to justify both the enslavement of African and other peoples as well as the occupation of new territories. The reality of colonization implied a variety of systems of inclusion and exclusion. On this basis, a second discourse made its way into the legal debates about the status of indigenous peoples from the 16th century onwards. It was a discourse that extended the discussion of colonization and slavery to related topics and newly emerging scientific fields. Theorists such as Enrique Dussel even contend that theoretical philosophy was complicit in this effort. Perhaps authors were merely trying to provide reasons as to why the facts on the ground created by discoverers and conquerors were somehow justified, often making reference to the lesser “worth” of non-European peoples. What criteria for the establishment of colonies did discoverers and seafarers use when estimating the value of the land and the peoples living there?

The 17th century witnessed a variety of developments in natural history and legal theory; consequently, the justifications for further endeavors involving the conquest, colonization and subjugation of “inferior” peoples by other European powers besides Spain and Portugal were further refined. France, and Protestant or reformed countries like England, the Netherlands and, to a lesser extent, Denmark and Sweden, developed their own forms of legal and moral justification for colonization and enslavement. Protestant legal and natural theories largely relied on the arguments stemming from the School of Salamanca and related authors. They reconceptualized them with the aid of humanist interpretations of classical ancient texts, thus depending less on medieval Catholic authorities. A significant difference seems to lie in the fact that Protestant authors had to expend more time and effort into coping with the justifications involving the settlers’ practice of considering the land they occupied as devoid of legal entities, that is, as a kind of terra nullius, consequently waging private wars – as defined by Hugo Grotius – to defend it. By contrast, Spanish and Portuguese authors attempted to provide justifications for the public wars of their crowns. Even where the activities concerning colonization and slaveholding were rather similar, as in the English plantations on Barbados, the narratives seem to have been based more on an individualistic perspective than those of Catholic powers.

From the late 17th and early 18th century onwards, in the light of a shift to a more secularized interpretation of man’s position in nature, the borders between the denominations were blurred even more than they had been in the previous century. It was here that new or suppressed concepts received increased attention and gained importance. Natural philosophy, natural history, anthropology and the emerging, new understanding of science all played a significant role in the novel conception of nature as a unity. One of the concepts used in these justifications of colonization and enslavement was that of race. It gave rise to theories concerning the hierarchies between different races. Even though the notion of race was never consolidated into a single theory, nor had there ever been one dominant theory of race accepted by most scholars until the end of the 18th century (if not even later), the concept played an enormous role in the apology of colonial domination. White domination seemed inevitable, given the “factual” inferiority of the other races that needed guidance. The inception of race – as a rather modern concept – occurred around 1500, yet it lacked a comprehensive narrative and lacked the recognition of contemporary biblical interpretations of nature. Eventually, the shift in the understanding of what science is, or should be, in the 16th century – most notably in the aftermath of Bacon and Descartes – gave way to new forms of knowledge and scientific understanding, eventually paving the way for a radicalized and racialized anthropology. In this way, the concept of race became interwoven with natural law and anthropological debate from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Given the suspicion that rationality – so-called Western rationality – itself belongs to a colonial way of thinking, the final part of the present volume is dedicated to the topic of decolonization: what the term signifies, its implications, and whether decolonial authors should see any critic of “Western” rationality (including thinkers like Heidegger and Carl Schmitt) as their “natural” ally.

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Section One: The Debate on Just War, Conquest and Slavery

Cláudia Teixeira begins at the chronological starting point of the conference in the 16th century with the claim that the competition between colonial power led the Jesuit Luis de Molina to limit the right to travel and trade under the law of nations as presented by his Dominican predecessor Francisco de Vitoria. Vitoria used the ius peregrinandi and dominium to focus on the political legitimacy of the native Americans while at the same time justifying the war against them. Molina, by contrast, employed these two Roman law concepts with the political competition in Brazil in mind. In Brazil, French aspirations from 1555 to 1575 to establish a colony threatened the Portuguese hegemony and, more generally represented one instance of many to come that would put the order established by the Treaty of Tordesillas into question. Molina’s different stance from Vitoria reflects a reaction to this circumstance. Danaë Simmermacher underlines the extraordinary role of the Spanish Jesuit in Portuguese services with her claim that Molina tied (subjective) right or ius to the individual qua homo rather than to his political or religious identity. Molina thereby offered the foundation for a theory of fundamental rights, although they are not to be equated with human rights, not least because the rights he envisaged were alienable. Jörg Tellkamp considers the hitherto little regarded Augustinian friar Alonso de la Veracruz who was taught by Vitoria and Domingo de Soto and spent many years in Mexico. Tellkamp shows that Veracruz defended the rights of indigenous peoples over the land in central Mexico, while at the same time takes the rightfulness of the Spanish colonizing efforts in the Americas for granted. In this way, he used his practical experience to support the general theory of dominium and rights articulated in the late scholastic tradition.

The step into the 17th century and from the political to the linguistic context is made by Roberto Hofmeister Pich, who takes a closer look at the link between colonization and Christian mission in religious language. This link led to the emergence of a socio-political order that expressed itself in particular in black slavery. Francisco José de Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans interpreted this development as the corruption of the Christian religion and criticized it with the weapons of religious language. Norbert Campagna provides an analysis of Juan Solórzano y Pereira’s Política Indiana of 1648 with regard to the doctrine of razón de estado or reason of state. He argues that Solórzano y Pereira, who spent 17 years in Perú, adjusted the legal and moral regard for indigenous people at the level of activity for the common good. Distinguishing between good and bad reason of state, Solórzano y Pereira claims that labor for the common good should be undertaken by both the Indians and the Spaniards, but forced labor for personal services was not to be permitted. Christoph Haar considers the idea that America was undeveloped or uninhabited. He argues that Hugo Grotius used his scholastic anthropology, peculiar to his late work De Iure Belli ac Pacis, to grant indigenous Americans sovereignty on the basis of their natural, simple way of life and their political organization. At the same time, however, Grotius emphasized private property rights that European settlers could claim and defend in unoccupied areas.

Matthias Kaufmann outlines two types of justification for colonial activity and enslavement in the early modern period. In the 17th century, the traditional public-law figure of the just war against true owners of their territories, veri domini, was supplemented by a private-law argument that emerged based on the legal figures of first occupation and a labor theory of property. This dynamic went hand in hand with anthropological assumptions, which, with narratives increasingly couched in the language of natural science, brought about the supposedly self-evident lesser value of non-European, non-Christian, non-white populations. The frequent repetition of the hypotheses that could justify colonial practices were thus transformed by the later 18th century into simple statements of fact, considered obviously true to the extent that they did not require any proof or explanation anymore.

Moving to the turn of the 19th century, Alison Stone interprets Friedrich Hegel’s understanding of freedom as relying on a political purpose rather than exclusively on a detached philosophical enterprise. She develops the thesis that the teleological structure of Hegel’s thought signified an endemic colonialism: freedom in the true sense of the word comes to the fore at such a late stage of a political community that colonial practices are philosophically included in all previous intermediate steps.

Section Two: From Sins against Nature to Matter of Fact: Justifications of Racial Hierarchies

Connecting the concepts of race with time, Christian Müller demonstrates that late Enlightenment and idealist thinkers considered human development as a steady progress that had a beginning and an end. In the final analysis, in one respect time became a way to measure the distance between different cultures on this scale, in another respect time was used to naturalize cultural traits and make them appear biological. Manuela Massa considers the concept of sins against nature in relation to the early modern Spanish justifications for waging war. She examines in what senses this justification was deemed insufficient, and ties this line of argument to the philosophical debates surrounding the notion of eurocentrism.

Suman Seth examines the appearance of race medicine in the British colonies of the mid to late 18th century. He points out how in this period race and medicine were connected in way that produced race pathologies rather than anatomies. The result was that the physical side, not the traditional intellectual side, became decisive for medical theory formation and practice, and thence for discourses of colonialism and abolition.

Section Three: The Decolonization of Reason

Gregory Fried examines the work of Heidegger to consider the project of decolonizing reason. Heidegger may turn out to represent a useful resource for this project insofar as his oeuvre could support the search for a rationality that balances the claims of universal justice with the situated nature of human understanding as it exists in historical communities.

Giuseppe Tosi analyses Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of Vitoria’s lectures De Indis in the context of Schmitt’s claim that the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 marked a founding moment of modern international law understood as a legal order of sovereign states, which he calls the ius publicum Europaeum. Tosi argues that Vitoria does not fit easily into Schmitt’s categorization of the Salamancan theologian as part of the medieval tradition of ius gentium and just war. In sum, he claims change in the international legal order was not mainly stimulated by the disappearance (in the 17th and 18th centuries) and return (in the 20th century) of just war theory, as Schmitt had supposed, but rather by the end of the absolute sovereignty of states in the second half of the 20th century.

Arguing in the tradition of specifically French philosophy, Jean-Christophe Goddard interprets decolonization essentially as a struggle against the exploitation of (formerly) colonial territories, accompanied by a “reverse anthropology” on the part of the autochthons. Stefan Knauß analyses the history of racism and its consequences up to the present from a decolonial perspective, referring to the concept of the coloniality of power in the work of the Latin American authors Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo. Constitutive for this perspective is a heuristic position “outside” European modernity, based, among other things, on Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of exteriority. Knauß suggests that the systematic position of this viewer’s perspective and the associated coming to terms with, and criticism of, colonial racism should be seen as an alternative, intercultural justification of human rights.